I am Adjunct Professor of Economics at Grove City College. My interests are varied—graduate work in law at the University of Michigan, literature at Oxford, moral education at Harvard, and economics under the tutelage of Hans F. Sennholz, who earned his doctorate under Ludwig von Mises. My libertarian economics is fused with traditional American values. My most recent book is “Problems with Piketty: The Flaws and Fallacies in Capital in the Twenty-First Century" (2014).

A Shouting Match And A Major Audience Problem Don't Mar A Wonderful Tea Party Meeting

There was a shouting match. Two men were quite upset with each other. There was also a major problem with the audience. Yet, I’m glad I was there. Where? At a tea party patriot meeting that I addressed last week.

Politics continues to be an exercise of frustration for many Americans, but frustration can also give one hope for the future, and that is what I took away from the meeting. Another positive takeaway was the quality of the audience. I admired them. (I’ll get to the problem with the audience later). A few years ago, half of the tea party events at which I spoke seemed to be little more than anti-Obama rallies. During this meeting, however, Obama was rarely mentioned. This demonstrates the growing maturity and political sophistication of the tea party movement. There is a widespread understanding that our country has problems that extend far beyond the deleterious economic policy of the current administration.

OK, let’s get to the fun stuff—the fireworks. There were five speakers including myself. The other speakers were the head of the local college Republicans, U.S. Reps. Mike Kelly and Bill Shuster, and Pa. Lt. Gov. Jim Cawley. Afterward there was a Q&A session. A man interrupted one of Rep. Kelly’s answers. The man first pleaded for, and then demanded, a firm commitment not to raise the debt ceiling under any circumstances.

When Kelly mentioned the political risks—a potentially strong backlash against Republicans if there is a government shutdown and the concomitant nightmarish possibility of Democrats regaining control of the House and reinstating Nancy Pelosi as speaker—the man in the audience would have none of it. He raised his voice and essentially said, “Shut the government down if you have to. Enough is enough. No more red ink!” He basically accused Kelly of wimping out, which angered the congressman, and the next thing you know, there was a shouting match for a few moments. The irony of this particular confrontation is that a big reason Mike Kelly ran for Congress was to try to stanch Washington’s destructive flow of red ink before the national debt crushed his grandchildren’s generation.

Is the glass half-full or half-empty? Looked at negatively, one might despair about our prospects for shrinking government if two men who share that goal can’t seem to get along. The positive side of this is that strong feelings arose precisely because of the intensity of the desire to shrink government.

I can see both sides of the spat. The man’s strong stance triggered a flashback to the late ‘70s when a Californian named Howard Jarvis had gotten similarly fed up and declared, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take it anymore!” I thought, Bless your heart, fellow, you’re right—this insane deficit spending that is saddling our children with crushing debt is unconscionable, indefensible, immoral, and unsustainable, and it needs to stop—now, not later. I fervently hope this man doesn’t yield to frustration and drop out of the political fray, because there must be thousands like him, just waiting for another Howard Jarvis to emerge. Someone with the money, time, and savvy to organize a successful grass-roots shrink-the-government revolt like Jarvis did.

I can also understand the congressman’s excruciating frustration. He desperately wants to end the madness, but he is torn, because he also wants to avert an electoral debacle in 2014 that would cost Republicans their majority in the House of Representatives—the only counterweight in Washington to the big government progressives.

Add to the frustrations already mentioned, I was frustrated by the composition of the audience. The folks who were there were great. It was the people who weren’t represented that I found dismaying. Other than the troopers from the local university’s Young Republicans, there was hardly anyone there under the age of 40. What is so disconcerting about this is that the major beneficiaries of the tea party movement’s main goal—to shrink government and lessen the national debt—are those of the younger generations. We baby boomers have had the privilege of being Americans at a time when we could enjoy the American dream to its fullest. We just want the same for younger Americans.

Maybe they feel discouraged because they are outnumbered by us boomers. Maybe they have grown fatalistic, thinking that Uncle Sam’s fiscal house of cards is doomed no matter what they do. Maybe they’ve been lulled into apathy by pernicious indoctrination in public schools that have taught them the fairy tale that government will always take care of them in a pinch. Whatever the reasons, we need to get more young people involved in the tea party movement or their generation will be toast.

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